Why Bush's Legacy Might Not Be as Bad as You Thought

Two places where Dubya may have gotten it right, plus Rush Limbaugh's radical new way to solve the economic bailout.

Writer-at-large John H. Richardson's column, "The Richardson Report," runs right here each Tuesday.

It's George W. Bush appreciation week!

Let's start with the election in Iraq last week, dramatic evidence that the surge is really taking root. People voted freely and enthusiastically and in relative safety. If this continues, it will be a wonderful thing for humanity and also for the legacy of George W. Bush, which will get the revaluation that his partisans have long predicted.

Of course, that revaluation would also have to weigh his administration's flagrant dishonesty over the WMD intelligence, the death of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the impact of the war and the various torture scandals on terrorist recruitment, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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But still, one has to be fair. Underneath all the propaganda about trying to democratize the Middle East it was obvious, to anyone with a brain, that the main goal of the Bush administration in Iraq was always a strategic one – to counter the shadowy threat of terrorism by making a big show of American power. It was the beat-up-the-bully theory of prison survival gone global. Iraq's strategic value and access to the second-largest oil fields in the world didn't hurt either.

For the Iraqis, it's hard to see how so many deaths could be justified. The American dead will never return either. But for the United States as a global superpower tending to its national interest, the Iraq gamble may still pay off. And we will remember that Bush stood fast on the surge.

Also, Bush Is Smarter Than Rush Limbaugh

Bush may also come out looking courageous over the bailout, which he championed in the face of resistance from his party. It's actually surprising how little has been said about this. Some of the specific choices will look foolish in retrospect, but it's impossible to do anything so large without making mistakes. The important thing is that his administration moved swiftly and with remarkable pragmatism to try to contain the problem – and in doing so they jettisoned, with breathtaking speed, the last 100 years of Republican economic ideology.

Maybe that's why the surviving Republicans have gone into a brain freeze. Like malfunctioning robots, they can only repeat one canned phrase: Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.

My favorite brain-freeze moment came from Rush Limbaugh, who followed his dust-up with Barack Obama last week with a proposal for "the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009." Figuring the presidential vote at 54 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain, Limbaugh suggested that we overlook the fact that Obama actually won the election and split the $1 trillion stimulus by the same percentage, giving $540 billion to be "spent on infrastructure as defined by President Obama and the Democrats" and the remaining $460 billion towards tax cuts. This would be "a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions," Limbaugh said.

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This is a great idea that needs a slight tweak. In order to accurately determine which was the most effective method for ending recession, we'd have to separate the revenue streams. The obvious solution is to give all these Republican senators and congressmen and governors who call for tax cuts instead of government spending exactly what they want – no federal taxes, and no federal money for their states.

That's what the Governor of South Carolina argued way back in October. Rather than giving "a bag of money with strings attached" and spending "even more taxpayer dollars in a desperate attempt to catalyze a souring economy," Mark Sanford told the House Ways and Means Committee, why not cut some of the mandates the federal government imposes on the states? The examples he gave included the Real ID program, increases in the minimum wage, No Child Left Behind, regulations on prescription drug plans, bioterrorism upgrades, and money to cover cuts in Federal Food Stamps. All those added up to $131 billion in savings for all fifty states, $500 million for South Carolina. Sanford also complained about Medicaid, which "grew 9.5 percent per year over the last decade." [Ed href='/news-politics/a5515/mark-sanford-bailouts-010709/">his letter to Esquire.com from January 7.']

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So under the Obama-Limbaugh-Richardson plan, South Carolina gets no bailout money plus big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps and education. It also has to learn to live without bioterrorism upgrades and other liberal frills like unemployment payments. We'll also be willing to close the post offices, certain that the citizens of South Carolina will be happy to serve capitalism's cause by sending all their mail through private companies. But alas, federal taxes won't really go down much because South Carolina will still have pay its share for the military and Social Security and the FBI and the INS and lots of other government services that are unlikely to disappear in the real world. And with all those cuts in medical services, they may also want to pitch in for the Center for Disease Control.

Let's do that in every state represented by Republicans who bash the federal government – usually welfare states that take way more money from the feds than they send back – and see how they do in the next elections.

And the Award for Most Poignant Piece of Political Journalism Goes to...

But I'm not immune to the small-budget dream. Growing up in the household of a professional cold warrior, I spent a chunk of my teenager years reading anti-communist literature like The Totalitarian Temptation and The True Believer. "Economic freedom is the beginning of all freedoms," my father told me a thousand times, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Later I worked in the energy economics department of a major Wall Street bank and absorbed the anti-collectivist argument of books like The Road to Serfdom. And Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had a point, it always seemed to me, when they argued that the growth of government can smother the golden goose of capitalism. So after all that, when reading about the economists who think we should just do nothing about the crash, to stop trying to re-inflate consumerism and let things deflate down to saner levels, it's hard not to feel a twinge of doubt.

"It is simply unrealistic to think that tax cuts will continue to be a viable political strategy when the budget deficit exceeds $1 trillion, as it will this year. Nor is it realistic to think that taxes can be kept at 19 percent of GDP when spending is projected to grow by about 50 percent of GDP over the next generation.... Given this reality, conservatives must adapt. If they continue to insist upon rolling back the welfare state by using tax cuts to 'starve the beast' or privatize Social Security and Medicare, they will fail. There is simply no appetite for big spending cuts or the radical restructuring of programs that benefit a huge percentage of Americans, especially when there has been a severe downturn in the stock market that has wiped out trillions of dollars in retirement savings."

That seems basically right. It's also clear that America needs some kind of universal health care system. Under those circumstances, Bartlett's advice seems pragmatic: "In the end, the welfare state is not going away, and it will be paid for one way or another. The sooner conservatives accept that fact, the sooner they will regain political power."

Since this does not look likely to happen, the only hope for the Republican party is a continued collapse of the economy. Talk about a moral hazard!

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